Hunted Cow released its new iOS game,Â Battle Dungeon, in the App Store less than a week ago, and the title has already been pulled. Why? Rampant piracy. The number of illegitimate users put such a strain on the game’s servers that Hunted Cow was forced to shut it down.

TheÂ RPG-like strategy game allowed users to play with each other and compete in leader boards, upgrade characters, etc. It’s a sad day for the game’s paying users.

In a statement on the Hunted Cow website:

Unfortunately we have taken Battle Dungeon down for the forseeable future. This was due to high levels of server load created by large numbers of pirated copies of the game. The high load revealed technical issues which we don’t feel we can fix to the level that our paying customers deserve.

Piracy is typically treated as a zero-sum percentage of a developer’s user base, but the pirates couldn’t be ignored in this case. BecauseÂ Battle Dungeon relied so heavily on its cloud servers, non-paying users hogging bandwidth was a very real problem.

Not only does Hunted Cow have to discontinueÂ Battle Dungeon for the foreseeable future, but legitimate users are being offered full refunds.